When the forum was started I saw mention made of freedom and that this would generally be a community modded forum. So, I was disappointed when two threads were recently locked. I saw no flaming or nastiness of any kind. Is this censorship? I thought that was one of the reasons many of us didn't like CF. I don't own this forum and understand that free speech does not apply here, but I understood this to be a different sort of forum than it now appears to be. Is homosexuality a forbidden topic? Or are any topics where there is constant disagreement and dead horse beating going to be locked? If so, I find that rather disappointing. IMO, such threads should not be locked and the horse beating should be allowed as long as members choose to respectfully participate in it. If some do not like (dead) horse beating, I would prefer they just stay out of the thread and post in other threads that do interest them.

Intention and Direction of This Forum

Thank you Wren for posting this. I understand how the closures might have sent the wrong message.

First, no. Homosexuality is not a forbidden topic. I wouldn't have started the gay marriage thread if it was The main reason it closed was because I, as the OP of the topic, had chosen to have it closed when I saw tempers flaring and recognized my own frustration with the topic. I merely saw us going in circles, unnecessary comments being made, and did not see any edifying discussion happening. So I decided that perhaps the thread would be better off closed. But I was acting as a poster in that situation, not as a staff member. So I asked a mod, Ethie, to close my thread for me. Which is the right of any poster here when they start a thread of their own - any OP is welcome to come to any of us to ask that their thread be closed.

After discussion, prompted by this thread, its been decided to reopen that thread for any who may still be interested in discussing it.

Hey Wren! Three months into the forum and I think we've got about 90% of the intention and direction hammered down. The last 10% will only be ironed out as we experience things like this. We haven't really discussed a "die is cast" rule yet concerning threads. If a person makes a thread, they can always request that it be closed. It's not set in stone that it must remain open. It's something we could discuss to make a thread suddenly become "community property" so to speak and only closable upon a clear rule infraction (which is pretty hard to do). Nevertheless little_tigress acted as a regular user, not a mod, and asked that her thread be closed.

No topics are verboten. Well, except discussing activities that are illegal in the US (country of origin for the company that owns the hardware that the forum is on) "How do I make blue meth like in Breaking Bad?" I think that'll get nuked. Horse beating, circular arguments, and etc. can continue and we can all just bow out of threads as we perceive they get less and less productive.

I wasn't around when the Gay Funeral thread was closed so can't speak to that one in specific.

I closed the Gay funeral thread because I felt that it was encouraging unnecessary behavior. But I had left it open even though I had felt that way... up until the last post which felt like a flame to me.

I closed it so that we could as mods discuss the issue and then it could be opened again. Maybe I should have just made a comment instead of closing it.

And to be honest as a mod I am very new to this and we three talk so much about how to make things better. We are learning and working to make things go smoothly even if at times we run into bumps and don't know exactly how to handle a situation. I personally felt in this case preventing something from being blow out of proportion was the safe choice. I was wrong I suppose.

As for the Gay Funeral thread, we've talked it over as a group and have decided that due to the nature and timing of the thread which only comes across as baiting and enourages behaviour we'd rather not see on Chatty, we will be leaving it closed.

I tossed that term out, so there's no specific meaning, but the gist of it is that if you post something, it's immediately out of your control to take back.

However, just perusing the forum logs I see that a lot of people choose to delete their own posts. Perhaps something too heated was said, or whatever. I don't know. When a post is deleted, it's gone forever, so I can't see why people did it.

Some forums and Q/A sites like StackExchange require users to agree that their posts are automatically released under a Creative Commons license of some kind. That would be a bit drastic for us right now, and we'd have to go back and make sure that everyone agreed to a license change. Switching that horse in mid-stream is rough to do.

I've actually heard the term before. Years ago, when the forum was still active, the Lush (bath and beauty company) forum had some people who wanted their threads deleted or locked, but were informed that the threads once created were property of the community. By community, I mean all of the members. You could start a discussion, but not control it....like offline. We couldn't delete posts there either, I believe. (Though I have deleted posts, I'd be willing to lose the ability to delete my posts.) That forum did not require we agree to anything like the Creative Commons license.

Basically, I'm for people not being able to lock their threads. It's always frustrated me on CF that you have a discussion going and the OP decides to lock it...kind of saying "too bad to any one of you who were enjoying this discussion, I have used my power as OP to decide that I don't want any of you to talk in my thread anymore." I think that once you create a thread, it is everyone's thread and a place for all members to discuss the topic (or related topics) introduced (not owned) by the OP.